Lydia’s Process for Selecting Books, Part I

I take reading very seriously as should be quite obvious by this time.  I’m a speed reader.  I can inhale books very quickly and as a result I go through a large volume of them each month.  A few months ago I was curious as to how much money I was saving by getting my books through the library here in Gwinnett County and due to their handy calculator I discovered I was saving upwards of $1200 monthly.  That’s a lot of cash.

I read a large amount of books, but I buy very few of them.  My criteria for buying a book I’ll write about later.

Sitting next to me on top of a bookshelf I have 4 piles of books.  Each pile contains between 6-12 books.  Each of those books was carefully picked out by me through various means.  I intend to share those with you because I have finally found a system that works quite well.

- The Book Cover
- The List
- The Recommendations
- The Advertisements
- The Author

I plan to write a few notes to cover this system so as not to bore you by putting it all on you at once.  Today I want to talk about the first two.

1. The Book Cover.  If a cover looks interesting, chances are – I’ll request the book.  Title matters, but not as much as you’d think.  I need to be intrigued enough to take a second look to actually see the title.

One example of an interesting cover is  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  It’s a neat, compact book, no flashy pictures, no babes erupting from lowered necklines, no hunks.  Just a clean red with a symbol that caught my eye.  Another cover that caught my eye was a recent read of mine named The Lost Cellos of Lev Aronson by Frances Brent.  The size of the book, the cover (an older picture of a gentleman playing the cello) prompted me to take a second look at the book and decide to request it, especially upon reading the name.

Not all books I read have interesting covers though. Pasadena by David Ebershoff (my current read) has a dull cover and… as I’ve found is pretty typical, a dull style to match.  It’s a shame really, because the story had so much potential.

The biggest method of shopping around for books to read when it comes to book covers is something I did today.  Today I walked through Barnes and Noble with my camera phone in hand, and I snapped pictures of books I thought looked interesting.  No one seemed to mind though.

2. The List.  I get in trouble with The List.  These are found in various places but the lists that get me in the most trouble are through my library.  My library has a tab named “New and Featured Titles!” and after clicking that tab you are taken to a marvelous wonderland of about 34 lists.  My favorite lists are “Uncommon Reads: Literary and Debut Authors” “New adult historical fiction” and “New adult fantasy”.  But there are lists for every type of reader out there – from cookbooks to non-fiction to scientific minds.  Through these lists I found wonderful gems of books such as A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka and The Calligrapher’s Daughter by Eugenia Kim.

Lists can also be found on blogs.  I have quite a few “online” friends that keep a list of their reading material, and I often find myself browsing through those lists and making notes of what interests me.  My thanks to you folks.  You make my life so much more interesting just by doing such a simple thing.

Thanks for reading my rambling here.  I have so much fun doing this, and I hope I can provide some of you with some ideas as well! Feel free to share places you research and get ideas for reading books from as well. I’m always looking for more input.

Thoughts on reading, writing and critiquing

I’ve always been a reader – from reading such classics as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to girlhood favorites such as Pride and Prejudice and Anne of Green Gables when I was very young – to today, when I have access to a wonderful library system and have been blessed enough to have a Kindle now so, on vacation, my reading time won’t be cramped!

I was reading through a series today recommended to me by a friend. It was ridiculous. Her characters were shallow, insipid, uninspired and frankly, made me sick. The writing style was annoying – as I told my father, characters in a book should be so well written that you are able to understand the character fully through their actions and spoken words. When you, as this author did, feel the need to include their thoughts through badly written italicized segments, the characters lose any mystery you might have wanted to create and it starts to become corny and.. old. Especially if this writing style continues through three or four series of books.

Now, I can understand why the average reader would enjoy the books. They were short (less than 200 pages), about paranormal things (I read a lot of fantasy/sci-fi) and had hunky men in them. But, frankly, where that would have satisfied me 10 years ago, I’m past it now and I want substance.

That’s my rant. In closing, I’d like to share something with you. After putting aside the horrible book and tossing all of that author’s books back into the bag for return to the library, I sat down with Cole to read two more chapters of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit . We’re nearing the end of the book now, and as I was reading at one point tears filled my eyes and goosebumps made their appearance. Here is a man who knew how to write a character. Read this, and tell me if you could not tell exactly what type of man Bard was:

—————-

But there was still a company of archers that held their ground among the burning houses. Their captain was Bard, grim-voiced and grim-faced, whose friends had accused him of prophesying floods and poisoned fish, though they knew his worth and courage. He was a descendant in long line of Girion, Lord of Dale, whose wife and child had escaped down the Running River from the ruin long ago. Now he shot with a great yew bow, till all his arrows but one were spent. The flames were near him. His companions were leaving him. He bent his bow for the last time.

Suddenly out of the dark something fluttered to his shoulder. He started- but it was only an old thrush. Unafraid it perched by his ear and it brought him news. Marvelling he found he could understand its tongue, for he was of the race of Dale.

“Wait! Wait!” it said to him. “The moon is rising. Look for the hollow of the left breast as he flies and turns above you!” And while Bard paused in wonder it told him of tidings up in the Mountain and of all it had heard.

Then Bard drew his bow-string back to his ear. The dragon was circling back, flying low, and as he came the moon rose above the eastern shore and silvered his great wings.

“Arrow!” said the bowman. “Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!”

The dragon swooped once more lower than ever, and as he turned and dived down his belly glittered white with sparkling fires of gems in the moon- but not in one place. The great bow twanged. The black arrow sped straight from the string, straight for the hollow by the left breast where the foreleg was flung wide. In it smote and vanished, barb, shaft and feather, so fierce was its flight. With a shriek that deafened men, felled trees and split stone, Smaug shot spouting into the air, turned over and crashed down from on high in ruin.

—————-

In those few short paragraphs, Tolkien took a man that we had just been introduced to, and made it so I not only knew what kind of man Bard was, but who he was, and he became a hero to me – not just because of the dragon he slew, but because of his strength, his fearlessness and his unwillingness to forsake his town and people. That is a well-written character, and that is what I look for in books I read today. Every now and then I find one, but not as often as I want to.

Credit to The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien. Passage taken from Chapter 14

An Invaluable Lesson

I know, I know. I’ve totally been slacking and finally I feel creative enough to actually do this again.  That is…if I can find my way around all the changes WordPress has made!

My life these days seems, at a glance, ordinary and repetitive.  As I was sitting here, checking email and listening to the washing machine spin, I realized that a lot of little things do happen each day that others might enjoy reading about.

Last Tuesday night I babysat for some neighborhood kiddos, and while standing outside with them I was approached by one and told, in a very matter-of-fact way, that I am fat.

Now – I’m going to go back to about a year ago.  When I arrived here in Atlanta, Cole was about the same age as this kiddo.  At that age kids are very open, and there’s really no “filter” made yet.  Cole very often would tell me that I was large, that I was fat, that I should grow up and be a “sumo wrestler”.  I had to remind myself of his age and try to take the hurt out of his words and we began to work on seeing beauty comes in all shapes and sizes.

That morning, while I was doing my workout (31 pounds lost and counting!), I turned to see Cole standing in the door of the playroom.  He had a bit of a smile on his face, a kind of absent-minded, loving look that I see quite often from him.  He then proceeded to hold his arms out clear in front of him and say, “Aunt.. your belly used to be this big,” and then he moved his hands in closer by half, “but now it’s only this big.  Good job, Aunt on losing weight.”

So when, that evening, he heard the neighborhood kiddo say this to me, he quickly hastened to my defense, “Aunt’s belly used to be this big,” he showed her, “but now it’s only this big.”  And the look on his face when he finished was the  sweetest, saddest expression.  The neighborhood kiddo informed him that it’s good because my belly was too big!  And he shook his head.  I asked him why he did not want my belly to be smaller, and he said “Hello! Pillow!”

I’m so very proud of him.  Where once he would look at me and see “fat Aunt”, today he looks at me and sees me as beautiful. He’s proud of me, and loves me, no matter my size.  And I think that I’m blessed that God has chosen me to be the one to teach this incredibly important lesson.